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22 October 2018

Alumni Futures readers who follow me on Twitter, and those connected to me via LinkedIn may already have seen the big personal news I shared last week:

I am thrilled to announce that I am returning to Brown University as Vice President for Alumni Relations.

It's exciting for me not only because I pursued my undergraduate education at Brown, but also because Brown's alumni office is where I started my higher education career almost 30 years ago! As assistant director in 1989, I began learning the basics of alumni engagement, and by the time I moved on to the University of Michigan, seven years later, alumni relations had become a much more professionalized business.

Today the profession is mature, but it continues to change, more rapidly and in more surprising ways than ever. I'm eager for the opportunity to address those challenges at a great university with a proud tradition of alumni outreach.

[I am thrilled to return to Brown University as Vice President for Alumni Relations]

I will be wrapping up a few unfinished consulting projects in the coming weeks, and I will take this opportunity to thank my colleagues and clients at Grenzebach Glier & Associates. I've probably learned more from my consulting clients since 2015 than they have learned from me, and I am very grateful to have had the opportunity to serve the advancement profession in that role.

I will start my new position at Brown on December 3, 2018. Here's the official announcement:

24 July 2018

For a long time, the word “alumni” referred only to graduates of schools and universities. Over time, however, we have increasingly used the term to describe individuals who share almost any specific past experience. Recently, I’ve been privileged to work on a project that revealed emerging practices in alumni engagement for charitable foundations, scholarly and artistic residency programs, fellowships, and other nonprofit organizations.

Funded by a grant from The Rockefeller Foundation, I led the creation of an alumni outreach strategy for the Bellagio Center in Italy. For decades, the Bellagio Center has hosted residents and conference participants in support of the Foundation’s mission: “to promote the well-being of humanity around the world.”

Identifying “Non-Traditional” Alumni Communities

In crafting the Bellagio Center’s alumni strategy, we considered “traditional” alumni groups to be those at academic institutions, such universities and schools. There is a long history of alumni organizing to support their alma mater and each other, usually aided by professional staff members. In the white paper, I examine so-called “non-traditional” alumni communities, share some of the principles learned in traditional settings, and describe how these principles apply to non-academic institutions.

Applying Universal Alumni Engagement Principles

Certain alumni engagement principles apply almost universally, such as using a shared experience to drive a sense of identity that lasts beyond the experience itself. Other common principles include prioritizing ways to interact with alumni, creating a strong brand for the alumni organization, and providing alumni with information they cannot obtain elsewhere. In the paper, I focus on unique opportunities for organizations with diverse purposes and missions to apply these principles.

Adopting Beneficial Practices

This field is in its formative stages, and some practices are certainly beneficial. But it is not yet clear whether other practices are “best” or merely “prevailing” practices. The clearly beneficial practices include highlighting early on participants' lifelong connection to the organization, a special status that distinguishes them from other stakeholders. I also recommend specific ways to compensate for the short amount of time that alumni may have interacted directly with an organization.

Building a Community of Practice

In the future, organizations will adapt established practices and imagine new ones to engage these alumni. These same organizations will benefit from regularly sharing with each other their engagement strategies, as well as their successes and challenges. For this reason, I believe the time is right for establishing a more formal community of practice that enables them to learn from one another’s experiences.

I also wanted to make a couple specific observations about this critical topic. After more than 25 years on the client side, and another four years consulting, I have spent the last six months working inside the platform provider's world. And in comparing all these viewpoints, I've noticed a few things about "alumni network platforms."

Is it Us or the Platform?

If alumni and students don’t coalesce online, there are several possibilities, which likely exist in various combinations and to various degrees:

There is no demand for the platform. You’re answering a question that nobody asked; or they asked, and their answer lies elsewhere online.

There is a demand, but your marketing is ineffective and you haven’t generated awareness and understanding. You answered a question that someone asked, but they didn’t hear your answer.

People tried out the platform and found it wanting. They heard your answer to their question, but they need a better answer. They are moving on.

But before you declare success or failure, the first thing to ask is, “Are we helping people do something they actually need to do?”

[Community members don't want features – they want results]

Take "mentoring" as a current example. Everybody wants a mentoring program. But often there is no clear demand for it. Mentoring seems like it would be helpful, if only some people would ask for it! Kieran Hanrahan at Switchboard has treated this topic in some depth, so I won’t explore it here, but if you’re wrestling with the mentoring topic, I recommend you read his article about "the black box of mentoring."

People Want Benefits, Not Features

Back to helping people do things they actually need to do. You should answer these questions:

Are we helping them do it more easily, more accessibly and more effectively than some other, comparable resource?

Do they know you’re doing it? Did you get the word out?

Does it work? Are you measuring outcomes that represent success to your audience?

To answer the last question, you must measure your success against community members’ needs. This is tough to do, but it’s important to try. If students join your site looking for internships, then the numbers of internships offered and accepted are the numbers to track. Having a lot of people offer internships, with few takers, is not success. Similarly, signing up mentors is good only if the mentoring leads to improved outcomes and satisfaction.

Alumni organizers should check whether alumni or students want the litany of digital features that some platforms offer. You thinking “that’s so cool!” should not be the selection criterion. Ryan lists some of these features - an alumni directory, photo galleries, job boards, mentoring, e-newsletters, groups and discussion forums. Some institutions will also have merchandise sales, membership dues collection, event registration and calendars.

Some of these features do enable successful outcomes. But your community members don’t want features. They want results - jobs, housing, advice, referrals and sometimes, merchandise or services. Unfortunately, many software features are just bells or whistles that don’t help your audience members do what they really need to do.

Problems with LinkedIn

Ryan also mentioned that LinkedIn is “a better and more important tool” for “network-building and communicating with new contacts.” I was one of LinkedIn's very early users (about the 34,000th LinkedIn member out of the more than half a billion profiles now on LinkedIn. I joined in 2003!). My experience is that most LinkedIn users interact very little.

LinkedIn has great potential value, mostly because of its massive user base. However, LinkedIn is also infamous for its clunky communication interface, and for its cumbersome, hard to find, sparsely populated group discussions. LinkedIn makes it easy for individuals to sign up and fill out a profile. Everything else on LinkedIn is hard for the average user. If LinkedIn were truly effective, you might not want a third-party platform at all.

[This is a great time to ask, "What are stakeholders looking for, and are we providing it?"]

LinkedIn is dropping the ball when it comes to alumni and students asking for help – or offering to help. Why? Because LinkedIn's communication tools are awkward and badly designed. Its alumni feature is difficult to locate, and its Groups have been hobbled and hidden as well.

So if alumni feel that LinkedIn really is "better and more important" than your own tools, you can definitely be doing more.

Building Awareness & Meeting Needs

Finally, back to marketing and building awareness. If you aren’t allocating resources to communicate the benefit of your platform, then the answer to Ryan’s original question is partly, “It’s you, not the platform.” But if community members do sign up only to find that your platform is hard to use, marginally beneficial and unpopulated – they will leave. Forever.

Yes, you have to market events and other activities, but increasingly, the opportunity cost of doing so is too high. This means every dollar or hour you spend promoting an event is at the cost of undermining your other efforts. Including your digital engagement.

Is that worth the risk? No! But what can you do? Well, start by doing fewer events (you're probably only attracting five percent of your audience to them anyway – at great cost in budget and staff time). Spend less on print. Segment communications more. Expect less from your legacy website. And re-write a team member's job description to include “network weaving” and brokering relationships, to build deeper (not just more) connections with stakeholders.

There's no silver bullet, but taking a cue from Ryan's questions, this is a great time to answer the questions, "What are stakeholders looking for, and are we providing it?"

26 February 2018

I'm pleased to provide a guest blog post, from Michael E. Griffin, Associate Vice President for Alumni Relations at Fordham University in New York.

While interviewing to lead the alumni relations team at Fordham University, I learned that Fordham’s president, Joseph M. McShane, S.J., was eager to reconstitute a university-wide alumni association. The former version ceased to exist sometime in the late ’90s or the early 2000s. Depending on whom you spoke with, this previous incarnation—which existed along with several school-based groups—faced various challenges, including setting overall priorities and dealing with financial and legal matters. Simply put, these organizations were not always operating in the best interests of the broader alumni population (of more than 175,000) or of Fordham University. So, as I accepted the role at Fordham, I was excited about the prospect of envisioning and creating a new alumni association.

As I immersed myself in my new job, I carved out the time to learn about the history, people, culture, and nuances of this rich and complex university. And I recognized that I didn’t have to start from scratch—others had recently taken a similar path. For inspiration, I spent time with colleagues from Boston College and the University of Southern California, and I also drew upon my own professional experience at Columbia University.

Three years in, armed with a growing fluency in all things Fordham and a good sense of a way forward, I was missing only one piece—objective and statistically valid data to either support or contradict what I had learned anecdotally. What do alumni think of Fordham? How was their student experience? Their alumni experience? What are we doing well? How can we better serve them, engage them, and bring them closer to the university? For this input, we commissioned PEG Ltd. to administer their Alumni Attitude Study. The results painted a detailed and accurate picture of what Fordham looked and felt like for our alumni.

[We had to articulate clearly why Fordham wanted to create a new alumni association]

Next came crafting the plan. And that had to start with clearly articulating why Fordham wanted to create a new alumni association. And, of course, setting the goals the new group would seek to accomplish. The first part was pretty straightforward: For almost two decades, there had been no formal platform for alumni to express their ideas, opinions, and views, and there had been no volunteer structure to foster and encourage greater alumni involvement with the life of the University. That had to change. As to working goals, we prioritized strengthening institutional identity and pride (a stronger Fordham benefits everyone), promoting alumni and cross-school connections (which would create a richer and more interdependent experience for all), and leveraging resources for the common good of our alumni and nine schools (which would help us become more strategic and efficient in our engagement efforts).

We named our emergent organization the Fordham University Alumni Association (FUAA), an inclusive, dues-free group serving all Fordham alumni worldwide. And drawing upon the work of peer institutions, we determined that the association’s voice to the University would be a 24-person alumni advisory board that would meet several times a year and assist us in informing, shaping, and guiding alumni engagement. There was no magical algorithm that helped us choose 24 as the number of representatives; we just thought it was the right size for an inclusive and diverse advisory board.

How did we compile our initial list of candidates? We made sure to consider all of Fordham’s schools and key constituent groups (such as trustees, athletics, and regional chapters). We looked for alumni with demonstrated and sustained volunteer involvement, a positive outlook, a creative and visionary mindset, and a temperament to engage in board work. We expect board members to attend meetings regularly, serve on task forces, be visible at events, assist with recruitment of new board members, and—as circumstances allow—support Fordham financially. To this end, we engaged in a little reverse engineering—most of those selected for the board were already donors at some level.

[Fordham now has 24 additional, knowledgeable ambassadors to tell the university's story]

We launched the FUAA in January of 2017 as the first university-wide association in more than 15 years. To date, the FUAA Advisory Board has convened three times. I am thoroughly impressed by the group’s thoughtfulness, energy, and commitment to fellow alumni and to Fordham. More specifically, the board already has three task forces—one focused on how alumni can help increase Fordham’s reputation around the world, another looking at ways the University can serve graduates' lifelong learning needs, and a third ensuring that our alumni relations efforts align with our graduates’ desires and expectations. But beyond the work of these task forces, Fordham University now has 24 additional, knowledgeable ambassadors to tell the Fordham story to alumni, prospective students, and the public.

I am not the only one impressed by the new Fordham University Alumni Association. Reception and feedback both on campus and in the alumni community has been uniformly positive. In fact, a “Meet the Board” reception for January of 2018 reached capacity with more than 300 RSVPs in just a few hours—making it one of our biggest alumni events of the year. I look forward to continuing to work with this group on initiatives that resonate with alumni and that raise Fordham’s profile.

07 February 2018

Hard to believe, but I started this website 11 years ago today, on February 7, 2007.

Since then, online communication has evolved rapidly. Blogs were declared dead (I never got the memo, obviously), and social media of various types come and go all the time. Just two years after I started blogging, the internet was already littered with failed online platforms, and the count of forgotten "communities" continues to mount every year.

But AlumnI Futures is still here, thanks to all you who are reading this now (whether it's on the website itself, in an email, or – for a small but dedicated number of you – in an RSS reader). And my purpose has not changed: to help my readers "hear and comment" about things that may affect their work.

I also post my articles in LinkedIn's Pulse platform, where they reach an audience outside my core higher education/alumni relations profession audience. And recently, Switchboard has hosted the same articles on the Switchboard blog, among a large number of other pieces designed to stimulate thought and discussion – and understanding – among people who care about the well-being and future of their communities.

Through it all, I still encourage, and benefit from your feedback and responses.

Meanwhile, thank you to all who have supported the blog over the years! (And watch this space for a guest-written article in a few days, about starting an alumni Board from the ground up.)

11 January 2018

Since joining Switchboard last year, I’ve seen the reaffirmation of three critical principles that drive successful alumni engagement. These golden rules apply to every type of alumni community—schools and universities, other non-profits, and corporate alumni networks alike. I know this from having worked in alumni relations professionally since 1989, blogged about the profession for 11 years, and consulted on it for about 50 organizations in a dozen countries. Through it all, these basic tenets have held true. They’re the kind of things that sound obvious when you hear them. Mentioning these guidelines generates vigorous and sincere agreement from alumni professionals, but scanning the profession, I see that many organizations ignore them in practice.

Many alumni teams still see themselves as community Town Criers. They broadcast “one-to-many” messages in a way that worked before the web made everyone a potential publisher.

Don’t just broadcast one-way news. Digital communication is an entirely two-way street. By listening to your audience you will

be seen as a community partner, not a top-down controller;

learn what people care about and the problems they are trying to solve; and

find a rich source of expertise, influence, and support for institutional initiatives that alumni find relevant to their own lives.

Stony Brook University’s approach to alumni relations is a prime example of this strategy. Their alumni relations team gets more done by asking what people need first and acting second, both with other offices on campus and alumni themselves.

Support alumni who self-organize

Until very recently, we labeled alumni and student interaction as “official” or “unofficial.” The implication? If the institution didn’t initiate, sponsor, promote and host the activity, it didn’t count.

But the mindset is shifting, and yesterday’s fretful “Not invented here!” is giving way to shouts of “Look! A genuine community!” These grassroots communities are easier than ever for alumni to build, thanks in large part to technologies that connect people wherever they are.

Alumni and students who self-organize deserve

recognition for their loyalty;

credit for trying to solve their own problems; and

resources to enhance their efforts.

We wrote about about this approach to engagement on the Switchboard blog back in August.

Balance broader engagement with deeper engagement

Metrics have evolved. We have moved beyond merely “reaching as many alumni as possible.” Why? Because with shrinking staff time and budgets, plus growing alumni populations, reaching more people means engaging them less deeply.

Alumni communities benefit when already-engaged members are engaged even more deeply through follow up communication, volunteer opportunities and other signals that recognize their commitment to the cause. When you balance deeper engagement with wider engagement, you

increase the quality of the overall alumni experience;

acknowledge those who have already raised their hands to say, “I’m in!”; and

Opportunities for deeper engagement will bring out those who truly want to participate. Oakland University’s Leadership OU program, for example, offers motivated students deeper involvement in their community and provides engaged alumni an opportunity to give back to their alma mater.

Adding even one more bullet point to your goals for 2018 might be a tall order, but more likely than not, these three points are already present in your list.

Your job now is to be sure you act on them in your work with alumni and student communities.